Chegg spent the pandemic as the internet's homework machine — a $12 billion company students paid $20 a month to answer their questions. Then those questions became free, instant, and infinite. Its stock is now worth 98 cents.
153 months of price history · Dec 2013 → Jul 2026 · monthly closing price · public market data · every figure recomputable
Chegg rode remote schooling from about $35 to a $96.53 peak in February 2021 — briefly a $12 billion company. What followed wasn't a correction. It was the market re-rating the entire business the moment students got a free tutor that never sleeps. Every point below is a monthly close.
On May 1, 2023, Chegg's CEO told investors that ChatGPT was starting to dent new-customer growth — among the first times a public company blamed a generative-AI product for its numbers in plain language. The market re-priced overnight.
| Date | Close | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Feb 2021 | $96.53 | Pandemic peak |
| Apr 2023 | $17.98 | Already down 81% from peak |
| May 2023 | $8.98 | “ChatGPT” admission · −50% in a month |
| Jul 2026 | $0.98 | Sub-dollar · delisting territory |
A single sentence about AI erased half a public company in a day.
Chegg's product was a paywall around answers — $15–20 a month to see a worked solution a human had once written. That is exactly the shape of task a language model does for free, instantly, with no subscription and no wait. When the thing you sell is the answer, and answers become abundant, there is no moat left to defend. The textbook-rental giant didn't lose to a competitor; it lost to a feature.
Chegg is a warning to every business whose value is answering a question a model can now answer for free. The subscription middleman between a person and an answer is the most exposed position on the internet. Three lessons.
1 · Own the answer, don't gate it. Value locked behind a paywall an AI can replicate for free evaporates. Value from proprietary data, workflow, or trust survives.
2 · Be the source the model cites, not the site it replaces. If AI answers from your content and credits you, disintermediation becomes distribution. If it answers instead of you, you're Chegg.
3 · Watch the tell. Chegg's stock moved months before its revenue did. The market prices the AI threat before the income statement admits it — and so do your competitors' customers.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Peak monthly close (Feb 2021) | $96.53 |
| Latest monthly close (Jul 2026) | $0.98 |
| Change from peak | −99.0% |
| Single-day drop, May 2, 2023 | −48% |
| Month of the ChatGPT admission | $17.98 → $8.98 (−50%) |
| Months of history measured | 153 (Dec 2013 – Jul 2026) |
| Source | Yahoo Finance, monthly close |
Was it really ChatGPT, or just a frothy stock falling? Both — but the timing is unambiguous: the largest single-day move in Chegg's history came the day after it named ChatGPT on an earnings call, May 2, 2023. Markets had months of macro to sell on before that; they waited for the AI sentence.
Is the company failing, or just the stock? Filings show falling subscribers, falling revenue, and repeated layoffs across 2023–2025. The stock led; the fundamentals followed it down.
Can I reproduce these numbers? Yes — every figure is monthly closing price from public market data (Yahoo Finance). Pull the ticker and check.
The businesses that survive the shift are the ones AI answers cite, not the ones it makes redundant. Run a free GEO audit and find out which side you're on.
The properties that survive AI produce genuinely useful, sourced material — the standard HarperFlow holds every article to.
Run the free audit